Caroline Kettlewell: About

I have a friend who has his own interior design company, and when he launched his company Web site recently, he spoke with some satisfaction of having managed to keep the whole thing unsullied by so much as a single word.

This is not that site.

The Early Years
I only ever wanted to be a writer. Perhaps this is because I come from people who are both bookish and wordy, often simultaneously. Perhaps it is because I grew up in the South, where impractical romanticism seeps into your pores, inspired by Flannery O’Connor and Stanley Kowalski’s heaving, sweaty passion, and you imagine that spending whole days at a time wrestling a single paragraph into submission is a respectable pursuit for an adult.

But I was born in the North, to Northern parents, and even an entire childhood spent amidst a Faulknerian landscape of honeysuckle and simmering repressions couldn’t overcome my native Yankee pragmatism. A good Yankee begins her first piggy bank in kindergarten with an eye towards retirement planning for the next 65 years. I knew that a writer’s life would be all about budget-brand macaroni-and-cheese and dunning notices from my creditors.

Thus, despite being utterly ill-suited for work involving regular hours, pantyhose, and the ability to say “skill set” with a straight face, not long after graduating from Williams College (BA, cum laude, in English, in case you wanted to know) I put my liberal arts degree to no use whatsoever for an extended stint in the trenches of Corporate America. Let’s gloss over this painful interlude, shall we?

The Books, So Far
Eventually, throwing off the shackles of corporate servitude, I escaped to grad school at George Mason University, where I earned an MA in English, in non-fiction writing and editing, and wrote the essay that eventually turned into my first book, Skin Game, and my literary debut as a paragon of good mental health. Skin Game, by the way, also has been published in Japan. In Japanese, of course, which means that while the book is a lovely thing to behold on my bookshelf, I can't read a word of it—for all I know it's actually Huckleberry Finn in translation.

Skin Game explores the I've-never-quite-figured-out-how-to-introduce-into-casual-conversation topic of self-injury, and thus it is not necessarily something that you want to read over lunch. Nevertheless, it has been deeply moving to hear from readers literally from around the world telling me what the book has meant to them.  It has been my honor as well regularly to be asked to speak on the subject at various events—including, for example, a couple of American Association of Suicidology annual conferences. Perhaps you didn't know there is an American Association of Suicidology? Frankly, neither did I, but now I have the canvas tote bag to prove it.

Feeling that one memoir was probably plenty enough for a lifetime and then some, I decided to cut loose and have some fun with my second book. The result is the lively true tale of long odds and underdogs, Electric Dreams. In these times when there seems to be a bottomless supply of overwhelmingly depressing and discouraging news from every quarter, I thought we could use a good, inspiring read to remind us that we all have the power to help change the world. Film rights to Electric Dreams, originally optioned by Participant Productions, have subsequently spun into the Hollywood limbo known as "turnaround," but we all keep our fingers crossed that some day, someday, not so very far in the future, this story will be coming to a multiplex near you.

And Besides Writing Books
Meanwhile, as a freelance writer, I favor adventure, outdoors, and science and environmental stories. I've written on topics including a wilderness survival class, a university-level competition to design and build solar-powered homes, an urban tribe, and the roof-rack as lifestyle statement for The Washington Post; the renaissance of the James River for Virginia Living magazine, wind power for Vegetarian Times, and a piece about attending the Virginia Biological Farming conference...

(There is nothing like attending a conference in a specialty not your own to make you wonder just what two post-secondary degrees and the educational loans to prove it actually learned you. And so while the opening remarks were drifting high over my head like so many cumulus on a summer’s day, I occupied myself casting sidelong glances at my fellow conferees, the Mennonite free-range-chicken farmers and the organic market-gardeners, and wondering if at any moment I might be unmasked as the kind of person whose first thought on horticulture is a Dorthy Parker quip)

...that I never did get around to finishing or submitting anywhere, but that did lead to a brief and amusing experiment with raising composting worms in my kitchen closet.

(And so, for the coming weeks, I drizzled an occasional handful of soggy cereal or slimy lettuce or fermenting pasta into the bin.  I was rewarded with an instructive and intimate lesson in How Food Rots.  It turns interesting colors.  It sags slowly into formlessness. It gives off noxious odors.  Very small things that you can sort of but not exactly see come from I don’t know where and colonize it, like distant cousins from Sandusky, whom you have never met, who show up on your doorstep unannounced with the intention of sleeping on your sofa and making free with your milk and bread and airing their reactionary political views.)

But I digress. Where was I? Oh yes, Stories I Have Written. Thanks to a story for the Post on open water swimming, that sport has become my new obsession. (Read all about it on my other blog, OpenWaterSwim.)

As for other c.v. kind of stuff: I've been a guest on The Diane Rehm Show, New York and Company, & Voices in the Family on Philadelphia public radio station WHYY; I've been a panelist/speaker at numerous conferences, seminars, book events, and whatnot; my work has been included in the anthologies Tales out of School: Contemporary Writers on their Student Years (Beacon Press, 2001) and Reflections on Anthropology: A Four-Field Reader (McGraw-Hill, 2004); I co-chaired the board of the non-profit James River Writers from January 2006-December 2007 and recently retired as the editor of JRW's bi-weekly e-newsletter, Get Your Word On, which reaches some 1500 subscribers; I've built a demonstration electric motor out of tape, magnets, a plastic cup, paperclips, and some wire; I have a great recipe for brownies, recently published in the delightful Art 180 community cookbook, If You Were a Food, What Would You Be?; I believe in the serial comma; and I can sing the opening ten lines of John Dryden’s "Absalom and Achitophel” to the tune of the 1974 Terry Jacks hit song "Seasons in the Sun."

And people say that an English degree is a waste of time.

Oh yes, and I'm known for my brevity.

Date updated: 02.01.08

Top